Comments on Eric Santner’s Book (2016) The Weight of All Flesh

Summary

In The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy (2016), professor Eric Santner presents an idea: Late medieval and early modern political theology transubstantiated into middle and late modern political economy.He does this through directed association, drawing on references that - at first - do not seem linked, then pulling them into an image of an abstract materiality shifting from the glorious body of the medieval king to the everyday regular citizen of the modern world.His argument sounds like a dream, demanding psychoanalytic interpretation.My interpretation uses the category-based nested form. This form permits different levels of complexity, ideal for examining Santner’s multilayered and intuitive presentation. The forms visually demonstrate that modern materialism is relational in nature.

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Comments on Eric Santner’s Book (2016) The Weight of All Flesh - Razie Mah

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Introduction

0001 Eric Santner wrote The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016). The main body of the book consists in a preface and two lectures. The two lectures constitute chapters 1 and 2. These chapters are broken into parts.

Santner’s presentations are works of art, composing the 2014 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley.

0002 The front piece is an introduction by Kevis Goodman. The end piece is a suite of comments by Bonnie Honig, Peter E. Gordon and Hent de Vries, followed by a reply by Eric Santner.

The responses are very challenging. How does one reply to something that sounds like free association?

Unfortunately, the front and end pieces will not be covered in these comments. However, the end piece may be used as an exercise in the methodology that composes these comments.

0003 Why is this interesting?

My interest is obvious once one looks at How To Define the Word Religionplus the first ten associated primers.

The tenth primer ends before the majesty of sovereign power. Primers 8, 9 and 10 tell of the difficulty of seeing beyond these mountains. Anyone who argues about politics can stir up an avalanche.

What does Primer 8 tell me?

Infrasovereign religions grasp for sovereign power in order to impose their organizational objectives on those outside their organization.

What about Primer 9?

Socrates had to drink hemlock. Why did he have to do that?

Primer 10?

Rene Girard proposes that a scapegoat mechanism is apparent in all civilizations. Plus, the mechanism comes into play when power structures try to preserve themselves.

Institutions occupy the content level of the society tier. They contextualize the organization tier. These institutions harbor organizational objects, objectsorganization, that call the individual into organization. These objectsorg are virtually situated by sovereign acts, laws and decrees.

0005 Eric Santner reads literature. He observes art. He sees that something changed in the West over the past few centuries.

What is this something?

It is completely missed by the current social and political sciences. However, it appears in Western paintings, poems, novels, plays, and other artistic works. This is the stuff that Eric Santner studies.

Preface 1

0006 Subject matter. What is it?

Matter is stuff. Subject is something that ends up objectified.

Okay, now what?

Does subject matter signal the objectification of matter?

Or does subject matter signify the objectification of something that matters?

0007 At the end of the Latin Age and the beginning of the Age of Ideas, around the 1600s AD, the subject matter of political theology was the king’s two bodies. One body was mortal. The other was sublime.

0008 To me, the glorious body is the normal context for the actuality of the king’s mortal body.

The nested form looks like this:

Sublime body3( mortal body2( potential of kingly being1))

0009 Does this express the character of the subject matter?

The mortal body is matter. The sublime body is the normal context that objectifies the mortal body. Thus, the king’s mortal body becomes a subject for political theology. The something that underlies the mortal body, giving its flesh weight, is the quality of being king.

0010 Moving to the present day, the matter of political theory falls to the people, rather than the king. The subject gets dispersed from one king to many citizens. The glorious body translates into what Michel Foucault calls discipline. The qualities that weight the mortal body of the king turn into biopower.

0011 To me, modern political theory translates into the following nested form:

Discipline3( citizen2( possibilities inherent in biopower1))

0012 The two nested forms are shown below:

0013 Normal context3 and possibility1 surcharge actuality2.

0014 The mortal body of the king is more than it otherwise would be in any other context. Its actuality possesses a surplus of immanence because it now has potential.

Similarly, one citizen may heroically rise above others as an expression of the biopower released by discipline. Other citizens are weighed and measured in the exercise of biopower.

0015 The pressure cooker of the royal person expanded to the business of the citizen. Medieval and early modern political theology gave way to modern political economy.

Preface 2

0016 Take a look at a painting. Jacques Louis David painted the extraordinary Death of Marat, during the French Revolution.

Compare this image to a wax effigy of a dead medieval king, or some other memorial, placed on the throne during official mourning.

0017 Jean-Paul Marat, the citizen, dies in his tub. David paints the death scene.

The king’s mortal body is buried. An icon of his sublime body is placed on the throne.

Clearly, David paints the equivalent to the sublime body of the citizen, Marat.

0018 One could say that this represents a loss of enchantment. After all, Marat, the revolutionary, hardly behaved royally.

This lack of royalty aligns with the emptiness above Marat, the corpse. The upper half of David’s painting is empty. If Marat had been royalty, the upper register would be full of angels and saints welcoming the glorious king.

What happened to the angels and saints?

0019 Heck, not even Marat’s fellow citizens are in the upper frame, registering the emotions of shock, grief, and, perhaps, relief. Critics have called the nondescript space above the dead Marat oppressive, abstract and unmotivated, characteristic of a representational deadlock.

0020 Perhaps, the cunning and ambitious artist was saying, Do not let this be you., while painting, This fellow was a citizen hero.

Santner does not tell why Marat got knifed in his enclosed bathtub filled with medicinal waters. Marat was a radical agitator. He named his newspaper, The People’s Friend. He was murdered by a woman who had come to him, claiming news from one of the districts of France.

During her trial, she testified that she killed one man in order to save one hundred thousand. She was found guilty. Her head was chopped off with a guillotine.

0021 Jacques-Louis David was charged with organizing Marat’s funeral. Surely, Marat was a martyr for the Revolution. Yet, despite the acclamation, no other figure appears in the painting.

0022 Why?

The reason is simple.

No sane person (whether angel, saint or fellow citizen) wanted to be associated with this crazy person, who was typical of the Jacobins, the party that celebrated the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being.

0023 David’s painting is both a warning and a paean.

0024 To Santner, the empty upper register of the painting associates to the impossibility of transcendence in the modern age. Business is busy-ness.

0025 Marat was in the busy-ness of cultivating biopower in the normal context of Jacobin discipline. He confounded Reason and the Supreme Being.

Other citizens were in the business of keeping their heads attached to their bodies. The way to do that was to keep busy. No one wanted to get involved in the business of citizen Marat.